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Author:

A New
Englander by birth and disposition, Ken Weene was trained as a minister and
psychologist and has worked as both an educator and psychotherapist. Now in
semi-retirement, he lives with his wife in Arizona.

Description:

Several
streams of narrative flow together in this panoptic examination of life, death,
and all the madness in between.

Appraisal:

I must
admit that I didn’t have very high expectations going into this. Like most
books by unfamiliar authors, I could only hope for the best while preparing for
the worst. Luckily for this cynic, however, Memoirs
from the Asylum turned out to be well worth the time spent reading it.

The title
seems purposefully ironic. Merriam-Webster defines “asylum” as “an inviolable
place of refuge and protection,” but could such a place actually exist? With 58
chapters divided between a mental institution and the equally mad world beyond
its walls, this book would seem to answer “no.” In the narrator’s repeated references
to his raging uncle’s depiction of a foundering ship, forever unfinished upon
its easel, the overall message seems to be that “there is no asylum, no
sanctuary, only the endless gray of the tossing seas of the endless paintings
of our endurance.”

Paradoxically,
the only asylum to be found anywhere is within the patients themselves, even as
they become prisoners to their own tormented thoughts. Regardless of their
individual limitations and psychoses, they can each take solace in whatever
measure of freedom still exists in their heads – provided it hasn’t been
completely cut, shocked, or drugged out of them already.

Marilyn for
instance, the resident catatonic, hasn’t moved a muscle in years. Instead, “she
sits inert in her room. She stares at the crack in the wall opposite her bed.
She stares at nothing, and she sees the world.” It is a world inhabited by her
childhood sweetheart, her dead mother and brother, and their beloved family
dog, taking turns in each others’ roles while perpetually morphing into
penises, balls of excrement, and various other objects across a range of
fantastical scenarios.

The
scatological motif is fitting, given how the patients are typically treated –
like crap. One callous orderly “look[ed] more like he should [have been] working
in a steel mill or chopping down trees,” the narrator tells us. “but there are
no mills, mines, or forests, not around here. We’re the industry, the factory:
human waste management at its most medical.”

If they’re
not written off or forgotten altogether, the patients are routinely abused by
those in position to do so. This is what inevitably happens wherever power is
exercised over those with few, if any, rights as human beings. With the
exception of one empathetic doctor and a handful of workers, most of the staff
seem more interested in pushing pills and preparing budget reports than
providing any kind of real care.

Mind you,
the patients aren’t the only loons in this bin. Everyone else gets to go home
at the end of the day, but given the pathological nature of the world outside,
it comes as no surprise that they all have certain “issues” of their own.
Everyone is crazy, but everyone knows this deep down. The world itself is an
insane asylum, but once again, there is no point in telling this to those of us
forced to live in it. Weene is adept at showing this, though, and he does so
with a panache that would make the
narrator’s departed cousin, Stan, whoop for the sheer joy of it.

The book
comes to a rather predictable conclusion, but that’s probably just because
there’s no other conclusion to be drawn. Upon his release, it doesn’t take our
narrator long to rediscover all of the awful, maddening things that led him to
commit himself in the first place. What keeps him going is “the possibility of
something better, of something however fragile rising from momentary glory,
from a lavender and apricot moment of joy.” The book isn’t quite as flowery as
all that, or even as dismal as the image of the foundering ship mentioned
earlier. It’s a lot of different, contrary things, but what else should we
expect from a book about insanity?

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